To be honest, all I cared about as a kid in 1972, was "when is Steve Carlton going to pitch again?" 27-10 (on a last-place team), 1.97 ERA, 310 strikeouts, unanimous Cy Young Award winner.
Posted on 06/23/2018 5:33:04 PM PDT by untenured
The early 1970s were a strange, chaotic, terrifying time. Exactly how strange, chaotic, and terrifying has been largely forgotten, to judge from how many Americans on both sides of the Donald Trump divide view our current tensions as unprecedentedly intense.
Journalist-historians Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis are not deliberately trying to deliver a message about historical perspective. But in their thrilling The Most Dangerous Man in America: Timothy Leary, Richard Nixon and the Hunt for the Fugitive King of LSD, they show how bad things got in a nation truly troubled by vicious culture wars, wracked by violent ideological conflict, and ruled by a near-lunatic abusing his power to pursue personal and political grudges.
Timothy Leary was a Harvard professor–turned–psychedelic advocate, a leader of the "head" faction that was rebelling against the establishment. He had been a voice for personal liberation and for "dropping out" of a stultifying culture, not a politically motivated leftist revolutionary. The U.S. government helped change that.
The war on the troublemaking psychologist is in progress as the book's narrative begins in May 1970. Leary, who had received a maximum sentence of 10 years for being caught with two charred marijuana roaches, is being shipped to a minimum security prison in San Luis Obispo, California...
That was the year I was born!
I believe that in the early 70s, a small percentage of America went crazy and got a lot of media coverage. Most Americans looked at the TV and said, “Those people are no good.”
In 2018, about half the people in America are crazy and they control the entire media. Half of America watch these people spout madness and they say, “See? Everyone agrees with me! Trump really is Hitler!”
Bill Ayres and others from that period are still around and stirring things up.
Same people/type of people. Same problems
Harvard boy....now that does figure doesn't it....
Tim Leary, the LSD prophet and proponent, also had some study time at the University of Alabama. He was acquainted with Mary Meyer, who was also a pioneer LSD user and was an influential mistress of President Kennedy. She was murdered on the C&O Canal towpath less than a year after the Dallas assassination of her lover.
Leary wrote of deep dark wild conspiracies involving her murder but in reality it was a sort of reverse-To-Kill-A-Mockingbird. The arrested killer was as guilty-as-Hades but the DC justice system and an all Black jury freed him.
At least that was when the NHL was an art form, with oldtimers like Tim Horton, Alex Delvecchio, Gump Worsley, and Dean Prentice still playing and the California Golden Seals were still in the league and places like Boston Garden and Detroit’s Olympia were still NHL arenas and the Los Angeles Kings still had their purple and gold uniforms and Guy Lafleur still wore a helmet and Andy Brown was one of the few maskless goalies in pro hockey, Connie Madigan was the league’s oldest rookie in the few games he played with the St. Louis Blues in his late 30’s after years of being in the old Western Hockey League, etc.
I wonder if Brian Doherty was even around in 1972.
I was 19 in that year, and can attest that the kooky left of those days can’t hold a candle to the hair-on-fire, foaming at the mouth, rabid mouth breathing, psychotically deranged left of today.
Heck, this country even had conservative, patriotic Democrats back in that time.
Hard core liberals, such as are commonplace today, were few, and most definitely on the fringes of society.
They were only just beginning to gain a real foothold in academia - at least above the radar.
Sure, the so-called ‘counter culture’ was still around from the sixties, but their heyday had come and gone. Vietnam was winding down, and the whole country was tired of fighting.
I could go on and on -— it was just a far different (and better) time than where we’re at today.
The lefty, stupid, POS authors of this patently ridiculous, specious book, don’t know nor understand the times they wrote this biased crap about.
Connie Madigan! Now there is a hockey name I hadn’t heard in a million years! Remember when he got smacked with a fish by 2 different fans, 2 different times in the same game irc, while playing in Seattle(?) I think he was with Portland’s WHL team then. Oh well, a long time ago anyway.
I do remember 1972. That was my junior/senior year in high school. I was watching some of the TV coverage of the Democratic National Convention, and said “Those are a bunch of Commies!” I was just 17, and not old enough to vote then. McGovern was the so-called “youth candidate”, but he did not represent my views at the time. I identified more as a Henry Jackson Democrat then. And the Democratic Party left me.
You said it perfectly.
I got out of the Army 31 March 1972. The rest of the year is a blur. All I remember is a tavern and Coors for $.35 a glass.
To answer your question...in one way it was MUCH worse, yet in another it was far better.
Imagine, if you will, if the BLM, Antifa, and all of the moronic females who march & protest today, along with those crazies who try to shoot GOPers were one group, led by people who actually knew what they were doing and made plans as a real army does. That's what the late '60s and early '70s were like. There WAS blood in a whole LOT of streets and bombs set off.
OTOH...though the lefties spewed nothing but foul language, "normal" people didn't; except for me, when I hit back at the SCUM, using their own words against them, which shocked the XXXX outta them, because I was their age, not on their side, and was better at intimidation than they were.
The worst thing about the early 70s was that American cars were beginning to suck. It got worse in ‘73, probably as part of the Divine punishment for Roe v. Wade.
To be honest, all I cared about as a kid in 1972, was "when is Steve Carlton going to pitch again?" 27-10 (on a last-place team), 1.97 ERA, 310 strikeouts, unanimous Cy Young Award winner.
The weekend hippies ( suburban kids who came into NYC on the weekends to pretend to be "baaaaaaaaaad" ) weren't too bad in the '60s, by 72, they were BAD!
The SDSers, Weathermen, the for REAL BLACK PANTHERS, and yes, the Manson crowd, were worse than the Antifa, BLMers, and assorted others of today.
I was also a big NHL hockey fan that year and watched the Bruins cruise to a second Stanley Cup in three years.
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